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| When the month began.... |
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| ...when the month ended. |
The month is coming to a close and the knifemaker's aunt is returning home. The learning, the living, and the loving of metalworking have been a dynamic educational experience. As demonstrated by her apron and name toggle, she learned the day-to-day work of how metal can be fired, hammered, ground, polished, and buffed into a gleaming knife blade or household product. With the process came the opportunity to re-visit how to set up an experiment when trying to investigate a new idea from an existing product: change only one variable at a time! Re-doing the experiment will have to wait for the next show coming up in the fall.
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From the ashes of a rusted
railroad spike come the
gleaming finished knife. |
With fire and manual labor, and the dirt that accumulates, the knifemaker's aunt made final products to demonstrate the steps necessary to work metal into nail knives, hooks, and broaches. Life lessons learned were 1- metalworking is a process that shapes the rhythm of working days, 2- metalworking brings with it the excitement of seeing a Phoenix rise from the ashes of filth, and 3- there is a constant activity to eliminate dirt. Just as folding clothes recurs every time clean clothes are produced, sweeping up metal dust recurs every time metal is forged, ground, or polished. One follows another. One is inevitable after the other. Once the rhythm is recognized, the days fall into a pattern and work doesn't seem like work anymore.
As for the day-to-day rhythm of seasonal visitors in a tourist area: the approach to scheduling work days should be approached as an annual pattern...work is every day until after the holidays when there is a 3-month break to catch a breath, take a break, and regroup for the next start of tourist season. In the teaching profession, this pattern is 3 months later with the break being during the summer months, not the winter. During the school year, teachers are on an alert day in and day out until the end of the academic year.
Valuable lessons all.
